Looking back as the year winds down, I discover that this has been a great month for the ol' blog. Second highest number of visitors ever. Yes, we are talking thousands. No big mystery, of course: people were keen to read about our Adventure Canada voyage Out of the Northwest Passage. And let's not kid ourselves: folks loved the related photos and, above all, the paintings by Sheena Fraser McGoogan, like the one to your left. Lots more turn up on Sheena's website.To move into the number two spot, December 2015 narrowly edged out September 2014. That was when I found myself talking about the discovery of the Erebus, and also about John Rae entering Westminster Abbey -- my most visited post ever. As for the number-one month, that remains October 2013. Does anyone remember the 50 Canadians, Ocean-to-Ocean, Book Tour Extravaganza sponsored by VIA-Rail and Harper Collins Canada. Complete with a contest featuring a travel voucher worth $5K? From Toronto, we traveled by train first to the Pacific and then to the Atlantic. It was all in aid of 50 Canadians Who Changed the World.The most popular post during that run, and second most popular of all time? Three reasons why I hate Calgary. Go figure. But hey, that's enough about me. Let's talk about YOU. What do YOU think about me?

Today we visited what is arguably the most
picturesque community in Greenland. The settlement of Itilleq is 49 km south of
Sisimiut on a small island at the mouth of Itilleq Fjord. Inhabited by about
100 Greenlanders, the town comprises a couple of dozen brightly painted houses
built on rocky black slopes. A neat graveyard alive with bright white crosses
overlooks the town. And beyond lies a spectacular ring of mountains.

The church was built in Thule in 1933 and moved here
three decades later. Today, it serves as a youth club and community centre.
About twenty people came on board the Ocean Endeavour for lunch, among them
some of the most amenable children in the Arctic. One two-year-old uttered not
a word of complaint while staffer Dave Freeze carried him hither and yon.

At the heart of Itilleq lies a soccer pitch, complete
with two nets. Here, a team of ambitious voyagers entered into a match. . . and
came within a hair’s breadth of making history by winning. We brought ashore a
number of ringers, among them Laura Baer, yoga teacher and zodiac driver. Another
of them, fellow driver Dawson Freeze, registered a beautiful goal. And hard-driving
passenger Eddie Carnegie notched a second.

Meanwhile, unfortunately, the Itilleq team scored
three times, and so walked away with a victory. Team members accepted the
Adventure Canada trophy with good cheer. Fact remains: the red-shirted
cheerleaders, under the leadership of Dave Freeze, stole the show with their
effervescence, their spirited chants, and their explosive dance routines. Yay,
Polar Bears!

DAY SEVENTEEN

Monday, Sept. 21

Kangerlussuaq lies at the end of one of the world’s
longest fjords, Sondre Stromfjord, which runs inland for 168 kilometres. This
is the site of one of Greenland’s four airports. The U.S. military built it during
the Second World War, and vacated in 1992. Voyagers spit into two groups, with
one travelling to the ice cap and the other doing a nature tour that included a
stop at a glacial lake and a long-distance sighting of hard-to-find muskox.

The previous evening had culminated in an ebullient
kitchen party featuring the house band. Unbeknownst to many, it also brought
the resolution of a kidnapping mystery that had been inspired by Margaret
Atwood’s Stone Mattress. Photographer
Andre Gallant had taken to presenting situational images of a rubber chicken he
called McChickie.

One night at the bar, a few staffers had kicked around the
idea of kidnapping Gallant’s yellow bird . . . and, when the popular critter
disappeared, and ransom demands ensued, suspicion fell mainly on the late-night
conspirators. Incredibly, the real culprits -- staffers Natalie Swain and Judy
Acres -- had hatched a parallel plan independently. But, unlike the late-night
talkers, they had acted on it. To Gallant’s relief, McChickie resurfaced
unharmed.

After dinner, with most voyagers heading for their
cabins and the ship sailing intoSondre
Stromfjod, the Aurora Borealis exploded into the night-time sky. This display
of Northern Lights provided a fitting cap to a voyage that had taken us more
than 5,000 kilometres through the Northwest Passage. Ah, for just one time . .
.

Sunrise in Karrat Fjord provided the most memorable
morning of the voyage, featuring dead calm waters, icebergs large and small,
wisps of fog swirling past distant mountain peaks, white-capped and soaring to 6,000
feet. Voyagers could hardly believe the vistas. Those who had visited this
sixty-kilometre-long fjord three or four times were left dazzled, declaring to
a person that they had never seen this stunning landscape look more
spectacular.

Many of us hiked the nearby peaks, around which gun-bearers
had established a perimeter that provided vistas of icebergs and floes. In the
distance across the water and ice, we could discern the settlement of
Nugatsiaq. More than one visitor remarked on the peacefulness and spirituality
of the island on which we had landed: Karrat Island. Call it gorgeous, though
even that word fails to capture the experience.

Latonia Hartery greeted voyagers at a small
graveyard, and Mark St. Onge explained that the sedimentary rocks, 1.95 billion
years old, showed that we were at the edge of the Rae Craton or tectonic plate.
He pointed out the highly visible Franklin Dyke, which had erupted into the
plate a mere 723 million years ago.

Back on the ship, the bravest among us went for a polar
dip. Forty-eight people (28 of them male) took the plunge, some of them retiring
later to the hot pool on Deck Six. Nobody showed any signs of wanting to
challenge the record, held by AC staffer John Houston, of 28 minutes in the
water.

Lunch became a back-deck barbecue in the sunshine,
with people sitting around at outdoor tables while enjoying a fabulous repast,
not incidentally surrounded by shutterbugs obsessively snapping as we sailed
through the most impressive iceberg

s we had yet seen. During the afternoon, as
we beat south, Hartery told the compelling story of Knud Rasmussen, Greenland’s
greatest explorer and anthropologist. She traced his career from his birth in Ilulllisat
through his seven Thule expeditions and beyond, including his six years on the
world lecture circuit. Among other achievements, Rasmussen demonstrated that
the so-called Peary Channel in northern Greenland did not exist, and that a
single Inuit culture extends from Greenland into Russia. He did this last while
spending 16 months traversing the Arctic from east to west.

Evening found the ship entering Disko Bay, and that
provided sufficient reason to launch a Disko Party. It began with the staff,
duly kitted out, performing a beautifully choreographed line dance directed by
Jocelyn Langford, who had brought aboard a large contingent of Roads Scholars. With
David Newland urging people to outdo themselves, several dancers showed moves
so distinctive that expedition leader Stefan Kindberg hurried to the bridge to
call the producer of Dancing With the
Stars.

DAY FIFTEEN

Saturday, Sept. 19

Late afternoon in Ilulissat, voyagers returned from
a 90-minute cruise among the icebergs
looking cold but exhilarated. The word on everybody’s lips: FANTASTIC! Oh, and
again: “This has been the best day of the trip!” Ilulissat is the third-largest
town in Greenland, with populations of 4,000 people and 6,000 dogs. Explorer-anthropologist
Knud Rasmussen was born here, and his home has become a notable museum. But the
main attraction is the Jakobshavn Icefjord, which has been a Unesco World
Heritage Site since 2004.

Flowing past the town at between 19 and 35 metres
per day, it produces 20 billion tons of ice each year, and spawns vastly more
icebergs than any glacier in the Arctic. Ice was much in evidence early this
morning as the Ocean Endeavour sailed carefully through Disko Bay to anchor
outside the town. The usual landing site was inaccessible to the ship, but
expedition leaders identified a second option and voyagers went ashore by
zodiac.

About twenty passengers set out on a helicopter
tour of the glacier, and came back raving about that. They had walked on the ice
cap itself, and flew so low during their return – roughly 2000 feet up -- that
they could see into the crevasses. Most
voyagers undertook the traditional three-kilometre walk through the colorful town
to the boardwalk and beyond,

where we scrambled to a hilltop vantage point and
looked out over the flowing icebergs. Today was all about the fantastical ice,
and this would be one of those few instances in which the old adage holds true:
in Ilulissat, a picture is worth 1,000 words.

Evening brought the Adventure Canada Variety Show .
. . and several passengers impressed their fellows as remarkably talented. Assistant
expedition leader David Reid, well known for his evocative poems, and having
declined an invitation to sing Flower of
Scotland, kicked off the evening with a superb song. And who could forget
the the visitation of Dr. John Rae, the skit skewering Stephen Harper, or the
Inuit dance that ended the show? That said, nobody implored performers to quit their
day jobs. [All photos by Sheena Fraser McGoogan]

A larger-than-life monument at Grise
Fjord, carved out of stone, depicts two Inuit: an adult female and a child.
These figures face towards Resolute Bay, where a companion statue of a male Inuk
gazes back at this memorial. Together, the two monuments speak to the
separation of families that occurred as a result of a government-driven displacement
-- an event whose repercussions have reverberated into the present day.

The statue here on Ellesmere Island, in the most northerly civilian settlement
in Canada, was erected in 2010 to begin the healing process necessitated by the
forced settlement of this community in the 1950s. Looty Pijamini did the
carving. His family was one of those to arrive here in 1953 and 1955. In a move
reminiscent of Scotland’s infamous Highland Clearances, the Canadian government
evacuated Inuit families from northern Quebec, claiming that here they would
flourish. In fact, the government engineered the relocation to assert
sovereignty over the region. And here, even more than in Resolute Bay, the
newcomers suffered.

At the two-year-old gymnasium,
voyagers enjoyed a fashion show. They gathered here after touring the town in
groups of twenty-five or thirty. One of the guides, seventeen-year-old Olaf
Christianson, capped the usual tour by taking us past two sheds he owns, and
showing off bear and muskox skins from animals he had taken. Along the way, and
in a short onboard presentation before the landing, we learned that:

Grise Fiord was charted and named
by Otto Sverdrup; The population is about 130, and
one third of those are young people attending school, where they learn from
five teachers; The town has an excellent medical
centre, built in 1989. The ship’s arrival coincided with a regular visit by a
dentist, and one member of the crew used his services; The original settlement, known as
the Old Village, was located nine kilometres away, an exposed point that can be
reached only by water. The town moved when the RCMP arrived in the 1960s. At 76
degrees 24 minutes north, Grise Fiord is 1544 kilometres from the Noth Pole.

DAY TEN:

Sept. 14

During the afternoon, driving west
across Baffin Bay in rough seas, we entered the area in which American explorer
Elisha Kent Kane accomplished an extraordinary escape across the polar ice. In
1855, from a latitude above 79 degrees, Kane led sixteen men to safety along
the Greenland coast on a 980-kilometre, small-boat journey. The sailing came
after the men hauled whaleboats to the mouth of Smith Sound, where they took to
the water. This they did six
decades before Ernest Shackleton worked his celebrated miracle-escape in the
Antarctic.

Kane was seeking the 1845 Franklin expedition,
which he and many others believed had got trapped in an Open Polar Sea beyond a
great ring of ice at the top of the world. Five years before, sailing as a ship’s
doctor on an American expedition encouraged by Lady Franklin, Kane had passed
through what he described as “a crowd of noble icebergs.” Prevailing currents
usually pushed this so-called “Middle Ice” to the west, opening a channel along
the Greenland coast. Whalers would follow this laneway as far north as Melville
Bay – essentially a massive indentation -- and then sail to the northwest,
crossing Baffin Bay through the relatively ice-free North Water – waters that,
in September 2015, we were now traversing.

Occasionally, to save valuable
summertime weeks, voyagers tried to thread their way through the Middle Ice. In
1819, Edward Parry had succeeded in this; a few years later, he wasted two
months trying. In July 1850, the highly literate Kane described the “vast plane
of undulating ice” as creating an unspeakable din of crackling, grinding and
splashing: “A great number of bergs, of shapes the most simple and most
complicated, of colors blue, white, and earth-stained, were tangled in this
floating field.” One evening, while standing on deck, he counted 240 icebergs
“of primary magnitude.” Today, with the Little Ice Age having become ancient
history, we churned through open seas.

In 1853, sailing now as captain of his
own ship, the ingenious Kane
passed through the Middle Ice by attaching his small wooden vessel – 26 metres,
144 tons – to an iceberg so huge that it tapped into a deep ocean current and flowed
north against the waves prevailing on the surface. He achieved a new “farthest
north” above 79 degrees, but spent two terrible winters trapped there.

Finally, in spring of 1855, Kane was forced to
abandon the Advance. He and his men
spent one month (May 17 to June 16) transporting supplies to Etah, then a
permanent home to several extended families. From there, having reached open
water, Kane said a fond farewell to his Inuit friends. With sixteen men (he had
lost two before setting out, and one had perished along the way), he piled into
two tiny boats and began his voyage south.

Eventually, after weeks battling winds, ice floes,
and near starvation, he reached Upernavik, the northernmost Danish settlement,
where he and his men stayed for a month before leaving on a supply ship. Kane
had found no Open Polar Sea, but he did find what came to be called – after
Robert Peary and Frederick Cook passed this way -- the American Route to the
Pole.

As the ship neared the foot of Croker
Bay, voyagers crowded onto the deck, dazzled by the sunshine magnificence of
Croker Glacier, essentially an ice river pouring down from the Devon Island ice
cap. This was our first look at big ice and we liked it. The bay takes its name
from John Wilson Croker, who served as first secretary of the Admiralty in the
early 1800s.

In 1818, some distance to the west of
here, Royal Navy Captain John Ross attached the name Croker to the Croker
Mountains, which apparently extended across Lancaster Sound. When these
mountains proved to be a fata morgana, an Arctic mirage, the British Admiralty
shifted the name to this deep bay on Devon Island. Oh, and to the Admiralty, John
Ross became persona non grata.

Late in the morning, Margaret Atwood
entertained with an autobiographical talk she called My Life & Writing (1939-2015). She started with her ancestors,
traced her childhood through old family photos, and followed the trajectory of
her career from poetry readings at the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto, through The Handmaid’s Tale, a breakout book
that made her “a little bit famous,” and on to the recent story collection Stone Mattress, which drew on a previous
Adventure Canada voyage for its title story. In response to a question about
why she kept writing, Atwood answered, “Why stop?” Writers are driven not by
external rewards, but by a desire to do what they do.

Afternoon sunshine accompanied us to
Dundas Harbour under a clear blue sky. The abandoned RCMP post was our
destination. It faces southwest over Bernier Bay, so-called in commemoration of
a 1906 stopover by Joseph Bernier. Here we found half a dozen beluga whales
cavorting within five metres of the shoreline – an attraction that alone was
worth the price of admission.

At the RCMP site, several buildings remain
standing: a detachment building (two-person living quarters), a separate house for
Inuit hunters, two latrines, a couple of storehouses, and a dog corral. The
main residence, which features considerable graffiti, contains a few bottles
and several books, the most curious of which is Dog
Crusoe and His Master by Robert Michael Ballantyne.

These buildings were erected in the
1920s to signal Canadian sovereignty. Passenger Dave Story drew attention to
what, beyond the dog corral, appears to be the lay-out of yet another large
square dwelling, marked by stones (probably a tent-like communal centre for
Inuit hunters). On a hill overlooking these buildings stands a white-fenced
cemetery containing two old graves marked by new gravestones.

Here we find the graves of constables
Victor Maisonneuve (1899-1926) and William Robert Stephens (1902-1927). The
first committed suicide, the second died while hunting. The HBC rented the
outpost briefly in the 1930s, and the RCMP maintained it until 1951, when it
moved to the less isolated Craig Harbour. The Mounties continue to maintain the
cemetery. In 1944, during the return voyage of the St. Roch through the
Northwest Passage, Henry Larsen called in here. , , ,

Before turning mainly to books about arctic exploration and Canadian history, Ken McGoogan worked for two decades as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Calgary, and Montreal. He teaches creative nonfiction writing through the University of Toronto and in the MFA program at King’s College in Halifax. Ken served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission, has written recently for Canada’s History, Canadian Geographic, and Maclean’s, and sails with Adventure Canada as a resource historian. Based in Toronto, he has given talks and presentations across Canada, from Dawson City to Dartmouth, and in places as different as Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Hobart.